


a million dreams

by kallistob



Series: Youtube AU [2]
Category: Kingsman (Movies), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesiac Harry Hart, Crush at First Sight, First Meetings, Fluff, Insecurity, M/M, Meet-Cute, social experiment au, they're not spies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 13:23:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14285838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kallistob/pseuds/kallistob
Summary: Eggsy agrees to star in a video called "What Strangers Think Of You". He stands in front of a two-way mirror, describing his flaws, while on the other side, someone he doesn't know compliments him.Eggsy is quite taken by the stranger when he finally meets him face to face.





	a million dreams

**Author's Note:**

> My first steps into the Kingsman fandom ! 
> 
> The video mentioned here actually exists on Youtube, and the title is the same. It's the same sort as that popular "strangers kiss for the first time" video that buzzed a couple years back. My first ideas on this can be found here : http://thegaypumpingthroughyourveins.tumblr.com/post/172756819520/youtube-au
> 
> I decided to go write the first one coz it was my fav, but I might do the others too. It's cute ! 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this ! <3

“... My name’s Eggsy - well, Gary, but I think it kinda sucks. So I’m called Eggsy. ‘Eggy’ for my baby sister.” Eggsy grins, wide and easy. “She’s too small to say it right yet.”

“And cut! Thanks man, I think we got it.”

“Cheers,” Eggsy says with a nod to the cameraman. The crew starts shuffling around him, the director coming over to review the footage they just filmed while Eggsy stands there, awkward. “So this it then?”

“Oh no, not at all.” The woman who’d first welcomed him when he entered the little flat steps up to him, and Eggsy blinks at her sudden reappearance.

“Hey Rox.”

“Hey Eggsy.” She smiles at him with the familiarity that ten years of friendship allow, and Eggsy returns it.

“I didn’t suck too much, eh?”

She shakes her head, reaches out to squeeze his shoulder. “No, not at all. We asked for honesty - you were perfect. Though I really had no idea you felt that way about your nose...”

“Piss off. There’s a second part to this, yeah? When does tha’ happen?”

“In a few minutes. We're just making sure we're in synch with the other side.”

“Oh, yeah.” Eggsy looks at the big ass mirror occupying the center of the room, otherwise devoid of furniture save for a couple chairs. There are only the crew men and their equipments, milling around. Eggsy knows that’s a two-way mirror, because Roxy explained it to him when she first dragged his ass into this project. He also knows that on the other side of that mirror, while he stood there describing what he saw as his physical flaws in front of the camera, a stranger was on the other side, watching him and describing his first impression of Eggsy, based on appearance alone.

Eggsy hopes his gold jacket and winged trainers gave them shivers.

And now it’s his turn. Stand in front of the mirror, stare at a stranger who can't see him, while he says whatever he feels like saying about them. Of course the whole point is not to tear people to shreds but to - in contrast to when people talk about themselves - make them feel better by complimenting them.

The video is all part of a bigger social project regarding self-identity, how society ideals can fuck up our confidence and how we view ourselves, etc. Eggsy kinda lost trail of Roxy’s explanation when she took out a clipboard and started reading a bullet point list of all the social experiments they intended to do to go through with this.

The one Eggsy finally agreed to participate in is a video called _What Do Strangers Think Of You_. A very unimaginative title, but one which gets the point across. The Internet will lap it up.

“We’re good here!” The cameraman calls. As if on cue, a door erected on the wall to Eggsy’s right opens. Roxy pushes him towards it, and Eggsy goes. On the other side, out of his sight, the stranger does the same, trading places with Eggsy until they are once again facing each other on either side of the room.

The man - for it is a man - does not look like what Eggsy imagined at all. He is tall, for one - taller than Eggsy, and about eighty percent of him is legs. The second thing that Eggsy thinks is _kind_. The stranger looks kind: he wears cream-colored, fitted pants, a light blue sweater that is a touch too large for him, and a bashful smile. His hair is greying at the temples, but it curls gently on his forehead.

The most interesting thing about him is the dark eyepatch he wears on the left side of his face, masking his eye from view. Eggsy steps closer to the glass, wondering. What happened to him?

Unheard by the young man, on the other side of the mirror, Harry Hart starts talking.

He takes himself in at first. Seizes up his reflection, how age marks his face, how one side of his vision is lost forever. How he knows his brain doesn’t work quite right anymore.

“Hello,” he says. “My name is Harry Hart. I’m fifty-five years old. I’m amnesiac. I am not quite sure of who I am. I think I might have once been a dashing young man, according to some pictures, but… I had an accident, and… It made my lose many things. My voice, for a time. My left eye. You cannot see it, thank god, but there's a pattern of scars on that side of my head which I find quite frankly disgusting to look at.

“My hair is grey. Age will do that. I rationally know that this is normal, but it doesn’t make looking at myself in the mirror every morning any easier. I think I would accept growing old more easily if I didn’t have half of my life missing from me because of --!”

Harry grits his teeth, unclenches his jaw. Breathes deeply. Tries to take a hold of himself, but he's been walking on a tightrope ever since the accident, and to remind himself of it like this… To describe his flaws as thought he wasn't hyperaware of them at all times… One can hardly fault him for being this close to irrationally losing his temper.

“As for the rest, well. I have a friend who tells me I used to be quite fit.” His smile is pale. “He invites me to the gym sometimes, but I feel I don’t have the strength to ever accept his invitation. People would laugh at me. Or pity me. I don’t know which is worse.

“Though perhaps the worse is the sense of wrongness, ever-present and encompassing in _everything_ I _do_ \- I feel like I am meant to be so much more than this - a bleary eyed, butterfly obsessed, old romantic fool --”

“Mr. Hart,” Roxy interrupts the older man firmly. “I think we’ve got it, thank you.”

“Shit,” Harry swears. He realizes his fists are tightly clenched, that he's bitten his tongue and hardly felt the pain. “I’m so sorry, I got carried away, I -”

“We asked for honesty,” Roxy says with a careless shrug. “We’re on a time limit though, I had to stop you.”

“Right,” Harry says slowly. “Right.” Just like when she first met him he starts to wither and retreat, hunching in a bit on himself, crossing his arms over his chest. He looks up at her despite being much taller, his gaze interrogative and insecure, like he is not sure whether he still has a right to be standing there. Roxy takes pity on him. She leads him by the arm to one of the chairs against the wall, and tells him to wait while they check the footage.

So Harry waits.

Of all the possible times to lose his composure… Merlin would laugh at him. Of course it had to happen now, while inside a room full of strangers recording him for posterity. The Internet. Same thing.

He met Roxy while walking the streets, on his way home from the bakery. Like many, she’d been intrigued by his eyepatch, and after making friendly conversation she’d asked him if he’d like to participate in their little project. Harry really had nothing better to do, so he said yes.

The young man he saw just before had been worth the trouble, though.

Harry feels a smile forming on his lips as he recalls the stranger’s utterly atrocious outfit, then how he'd smiled happily at a question Harry couldn’t hear, before launching into a passionate speech. His eyes were full of love as he spoke, his body language open and trusting; they’d probably interrogated him about his girlfriend, or his family

He was gorgeous. Splendid, even. Full to bursting with an energy Harry didn't possess anymore. 

Not that it mattered. There was a time he felt he would have mustered up the courage to own it to his attraction and talk to the young man, but now it just couldn't be. Harry was old, retired early, with half his life missing from his mind. Not the greatest relationship material. Not to mention their age difference, his nightmares, his… Himself. Everything about him.

Feeling bleak, Harry tries to straighten up a bit in his chair and not let it show. By Jove, but he’d really made a fool of himself, hadn’t he. None of the people present dared meet his eye now.

None except Roxy. _Mrs. Morton._ She insisted he called her by her first name, but Harry felt it was disrespectful to the young lady. Nevertheless, he followed her wishes.

And speaking of. She’s stopped in front of his chair, probably to dismiss him. Harry lets his eyes trail up her frail figure. Not even an hour of his day was dedicated to this, and he wishes he didn’t have to leave. His routine is incredibly depressing. He’s not ready to get back to it just yet. On the upside, he does have dinner with Merlin tonight - the man still refuses to tell him his real name, says Harry will remember in time - so perhaps not so monotonous a day after all.

“Yes, Mrs. Morton?”

“Before we call it a wrap we would like to ask you a few more questions, if that’s alright, Harry.”

“But of course.” Harry hastily gets up, brushes invisible wrinkles from his sweater. “Still in front of the mirror?”

“Yes sir.”

“Alright.” Harry walks across the room and resumes his previous position. He puts his hands in his pockets, tries to look confident, thinks of Merlin’s pictures showing another man with his face in a bespoke suit and imitates him. “Fire when ready.”

That sentence earns him a few snickers, and he smiles. He doesn’t look so bad when he smiles, he supposes.

“You mentioned when we first met that you had a dog,” Roxy tells him out of the blue. “Would you like to tell us about him?”

“Sure. Well I don’t remember him much, but hmm… I have a few pictures at home. Merlin, my best friend, showed them to me - there’s one where he’s wearing one of those Christmas jumpers for dogs, you know? Apparently it was my idea. Mr. Pickles - my dog - looks particularly unhappy with his situation.”

Harry continues talking, unaware that as the memories come back to him a genuine, honest, lovely smile transforms his features; that when he _laughs_ , Eggsy sucks in a breath on the other side of the mirror, taken aback by how gorgeous Harry looks.

He tells the camera as such, and the crew coo at him. Eggsy is utterly serious though - that guy is adorable. He needs his number, like, yesterday. He wants to take him out on a date and see if Harry’s hair is as soft as it looks and if he would smile that way - all sunny and bright - just for Eggsy.

In short? He’s fucked.

-

Later, they sit Eggsy down in a chair, and put a tablet between his hands. There’s a video playing - of the man in the mirror, Harry, he learns - reacting to seeing Eggsy for the first time. Eggsy sees himself, looking like the proper chav he is, baseball cap pulled low over his head and all. He starts talking, looking moody as hell, though he gets more confident the more he talks as the awkwardness of the situation recedes.

He doesn’t really remember what he said. Something about his nose, apparently, and his height - or lack thereof. He knows it don’t matter, but sometimes he feels self-conscious about it. Hell, real men like Harry are tall and comfortable in their skin, and for a long time he wished he was like them.

The Harry in the video says, “Well, his outfit is quite frankly terrible.” A pause, as he really takes Eggsy in from head to toe, and lingers on his face. “He is very pretty, for a man. Fair skin, green eyes, light hair. Like a Greek deity. A bit short, perhaps, but well built. He looks like a gymnast. Is he a gymnast?”

“What else do you see?” The cameraman asks.

“I see a young man with potential,” the stranger replies, sounding perfectly honest. “A young man who seems loyal, who wants to do something good with his life.”

The video ends there.

Eggsy stares at the dark screen. “Unbelievable,” he mutters, and it’s only when Roxy makes a move to take the tablet back that the world comes back into focus.

“Where is he?” He asks, uncaring if he suddenly looks a bit frenzied. He feels he needs to see this man in person, now, before he gets away.

He needs him to know Eggsy feels the same way about him. Needs to know if they have a _thing_.

He doesn’t even let Roxy answer, just dashes to the door and yanks it open. There’s no one in the corridor, but then he hears the toilet flush coming from his left and Harry comes out of the public loo, freezing like a deer in the headlights when he catches sight of Eggsy.

“Oh, dear,” he says. “Hello?”

Eggsy storms across the hall up to him and holds out his hand. “I’m Eggsy. Eggsy Unwin, nice to meet ya. I heard what ya said about me.” He winks, and to his utter delight Harry blushes.

“I - I -” the older man stutters, before meeting Eggsy’s gaze head on. In that split second where they truly look at each other for the first time Eggsy feels it - yes, what he was hoping for, that undeniable spark of attraction, biological, unexplainable chemistry that makes him think, _oh, hello. You - I’m not letting you go._

Harry’s eyes widen, for he feels it too. Against all odds, for a man at least twenty years his junior. “Buggering shit,” he murmurs, “Fuck, and bugger. Damn it.”

Eggsy bursts into surprised, helpless laughter.

Harry stares at him. A sheepish grin wakes on his face. They’re still holding hands, and he gives Eggsy’s a gentle squeeze.

Daringly, he says, “I don’t imagine you’d be free for coffee this afternoon?”

“Guv,” Eggsy says when he’s caught his breath; he’s still giggling, thinking back of Harry’s startled expression and his subsequent, unexpected swear fit. Fuckin’ priceless. “Hell, course I am. Ya just lead the way, eh?”

“Now?”

“Why not?” Eggsy says, looking up at him and still smiling so brightly. “Ya got somewhere to be?”

 _I really don’t_ , Harry thinks. For the first time since coming back home he is grateful that his timetable is a bit lacking. “Not at all. Just dinner with a friend tonight. Plenty of time for us to get acquainted, if you’re amenable to the idea.”

There. He doesn’t know where that burst of confidence came from, but it makes him feel a bit more like _himself._ Like who he ought to be.

Eggsy agrees with enthusiasm.

That night when he comes home, it’s with the tingling memory of Eggsy’s lips on his cheek and the young man’s number in his pocket.

He feels happy.

Quite unexpectedly so.

-

The end.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This work hasn't been betaed and English ain't my first language, so all mistakes are mine :) 
> 
> It didn't make it into the fic, but if you're curious, what Eggsy says about Harry is probably something along the lines of "Handsome bloke. He looks kind. I like his hair, it looks very soft eh." And then Harry smiles and Eggsy is like holy shit. 
> 
> >:D


End file.
